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The usable surface entrance to the Lower Works is at E18, outside the northeastern palisade, as shown on the camp map. E18-1 describes this concealed entrance; its descending passage leads to E18-2 — Access Ramp. The party can retrace this route to the surface.

The hidden cave beneath E13's log chute and hoist is a separate surface location. Its former hauling tunnel into the Lower Works is completely collapsed and impassable. The hoist, rails, chain runs, and gray clay preserve evidence of historical traffic, but do not provide access now.

Characters investigating E13 must return to the surface and travel outside the camp to E18 to go underground. There is no passable underground route between the cave beneath E13 and the Lower Works.

The Lower Works should immediately feel much larger than the party expected. They are not a single tunnel or hidden room. The Golden Hand has spent years cutting into the bluff, following natural caverns where possible and forcing passages through solid stone where necessary.

The main excavation consists of a broad central cavern connected to several galleries, work faces, drainage passages, storage niches, abandoned side tunnels, and deeper shafts. Much of the construction is rough but professionally reinforced.

The operation could have supported dozens of workers at a time. It required exactly the equipment the party may already have traced through Reiver's Right's records: structural timber, heavy chain, pulleys, picks, wedges, lamp oil, ventilation canvas, drainage pipe, hauling carts, rope, and replacement iron tools.

Although the Lower Works resemble a mine, there are surprisingly few signs of systematic ore extraction. There are no large sorting floors, smelting facilities, or organized piles of valuable mineral.

Instead, excavation faces appear to have been chosen deliberately. Some passages were abandoned after only a few yards while others were driven aggressively through difficult stone. Survey marks cover certain walls, and several galleries change direction abruptly as though the workers were following measurements rather than mineral veins.

Characters with experience in mining can recognize the distinction: the Golden Hand was searching for something rather than simply extracting whatever the rock contained.

The deeper portions of the Lower Works show increasingly obvious signs of infernal corruption. Black sap beads along roots exposed by excavation. Ember-red markings appear beneath strips of bark where living roots cross the cavern walls. In places, roots have forced themselves through cracks in stone that should be too narrow to support them.

Some support timbers have begun to change as well. The wood remains structurally sound, but dark veins run through the grain and patches of bark-like growth have formed over cut surfaces.

The corruption becomes more severe the farther the party travels from the concealed entrance and the closer they move toward the deepest excavation faces.

The gatehouse letter and Halven's account in the Bunkhouses establish that fifty workers escaped Reiver's Right on foot in two groups: one headed toward the Cedar Court and the other toward the Court of Endless Revelry. Both avoided the North Road near the Pulgari Estate. Their departure is confirmed; whether either group reached its destination remains unknown.

A few other workers were already unaccounted for before those fifty departed. This smaller missing group is separate from the fifty evacuees. The Lower Works provide evidence about these missing underground workers and the final shifts below the camp, not an alternative explanation for where the fifty refugees went.

Signs of hurried abandonment are everywhere: overturned carts, dropped tools, extinguished lamps, abandoned packs, broken stretchers, and half-completed shoring. They show that underground work was disrupted during the disaster. They do not establish that everyone assigned below remained underground; workers who escaped could have joined the fifty evacuees.

Some of the workers still missing may have fled deeper into the passages, been killed or transformed, become trapped by collapses, or been taken elsewhere. These remain possibilities until supported by specific discoveries. The party can investigate the missing crew here, while the fate of the two refugee groups must be learned by following their woodland routes, visiting the fey courts, or finding further witnesses.

The Lower Works contain the first physical evidence too extensive to explain away as bookkeeping irregularities. Crates bear matching authorization marks. Equipment tags correspond to suppliers found in Hendrick's records. Several work stations use the same hand-and-serpent symbol previously associated with the concealed financial network.

Hendrick's records, the suspicious purchases, and the physical excavation now fit together. Reiver's Right's logging operation was real, but it also supplied, staffed, and concealed this underground project.

Discovering the Lower Works should confirm the conspiracy without resolving its ultimate purpose. The party now knows that someone financed years of secret excavation beneath Reiver's Right and manipulated the site's agreements to make that digging possible.

What they should not learn yet is exactly what the Golden Hand hoped to find.

The deeper galleries should instead create a new question: what could possibly be buried beneath the Palakar that justified roughly three years of secrecy, false records, concealed labor, and forbidden excavation since the camp reopened in 4723 AR?

By the time the party enters the Lower Works, the investigation should stop being a theory. The Golden Hand was conducting a major clandestine excavation beneath Reiver's Right. Hendrick helped conceal it. Mining and excavation equipment were deliberately disguised among ordinary logging purchases, and a significant portion of the camp's workforce labored underground.

The party should also understand that the infernal blight becomes stronger around the excavation. Whether the digging released the corruption, disturbed something already present, or was deliberately attempting to reach it remains unresolved.